Human load-bearing has been facilitated throughout history by appliances attached to the human frame. These have included head-mounted tump-lines and body-mounted front, side, and back-packs, for burdens as light as a ‘papoose’ and as heavy as a hundred kilos of stone or wood.
Excepting the tump-line, all such load-bearing appliances must resist loads that, depending on their size and shape, are at least minimally displaced (cantilevered) away from the human frame and thus may cause the additional strain of a torque load on the upper body.
A problematic sub-category of cantilevered loads, including historical weaponry, flags and banners etc., involves objects positioned farther out in front of the torso, which therefore, place additional torque upon the structure and musculature of the human back—such as particularly the erector spinae muscles which flank the spine. This sub-category of burdens recently includes available assemblies which cantilever stabilized cameras and heavy industrial tools variably far out in front of their human operators. Operators of devices ‘floating’ on such equipoising arms are unable to squat or even bend forward without having to physically restrain their payloads from lurching away due to the action of gravity upon no-longer-vertical hinge pins, and enduring the added strain of eventually standing back upright while so burdened.
Fortunately, recent advances in bio-mechanics have yielded relatively lightweight exoskeletal appliances that can be ‘worn’ by humans and tirelessly facilitate ambulatory weight-carrying. These devices, teamed with adjunct Steadicam-type arms, can also indefinitely resist cantilevered torque loads, but they are all complicated, expensive and power-hungry—to such extent that a sizable portion of their payload capability must include batteries, fuel-cells or even generators if they are to be operated in a self-contained manner without being tethered to an external power source.
What is needed is a passive, human-wearable appliance that supports cantilevered loads for extended periods of time with relatively little or no strain on the upper body.
What is needed is a human-wearable exoskeletal appliance that resists cantilevered loads by countering them with the leaning-back mass of the entire body, transmitting the weight burden to the ground.
Also needed is a human-wearable exoskeletal appliance that supports cantilevered loads, yet operates passively, without powered actuation requiring onboard or external sources of energy.
And also needed is an exoskeletal appliance that permits leaning or squatting while substantially preserving the relative verticality of associated equipoising arm hinge-pins, and optionally provides powered assistance for returning to an upright position.
Also needed is a rugged, simple, inexpensive, lightweight exoskeletal appliance that functions primarily with resilient components for energy storage and retrieval, yet still permits relatively un-constrained ambulation.